King: Environmentalists need a dose of energy reality

Bill King says despite claims by activists, natural gas remains the cheapest fuel available for producing electricity with today's technologies.

By Bill King

Updated 3:55 pm, Saturday, April 13, 2013

I watched an interview recently in which Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, voiced his organization's opposition to the Keystone pipeline. He enumerated a number of concerns, such as the possibility that there could be a spill from the pipeline.

But as the interviewer pressed Brune, it became clear that the Keystone pipeline has become a proxy icon for the environmental community's general war on hydrocarbons as a fuel source and not about the actual merits of that project. Brune repeatedly stated during the interview that alternative energy sources, principally solar and wind, could provide the energy America needs more cheaply and cleanly than burning fossil fuels. The only problem is that it just ain't so.

First, not all forms of energy are perfectly interchangeable. Even if wind and solar could generate electricity at a price comparable to hydrocarbons, it is very difficult to use electricity as locomotion for transportation, our largest energy use. To do so will require a level of battery technology we have yet to develop. And the manufacture and disposal of batteries, especially on the scale that would be needed to power every vehicle in the world, have their own set of environmental issues. But if we just look at the comparable costs of generating electricity, wind and solar are still far more expensive than hydrocarbons and more expensive than natural gas in particular. Last year, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy, issued a report on the comparable costs of various energy sources for electric generation, assuming no special tax treatments. Keep in mind that this report was prepared by an Obama administration agency, hardly a friend of the oil and gas industry.

What this report shows is that natural gas by far is the cheapest fuel for producing electricity. The EIA estimates that natural gas, using the most advanced turbines, costs about $63 per megawatt hour. Wind is nearly 50 percent higher at $96 per megawatt hour. Solar photovoltaic panels are nearly 2½ times higher at $153 per megawatt hour. Even if you make power companies completely capture and sequester the carbon generated by burning natural gas, something of dubious environmental value, the cost is still slightly below wind and far cheaper than solar. Environmentalists like to gloss over this reality by highlighting the damage from particular incidents, like the recent pipeline spill in Arkansas and demonizing oil company profits. They fail to mention that the principal hardship for these increased energy costs would be borne by poor people, and especially the elderly.

One can hardly quarrel with environmentalists' goal of a world where we do not rely on the combustion of carbon-based fuels to provide the energy we need. And, certainly, we need to be moving in that direction in a reasonable and responsible fashion. But a carbon-free world is decades away. The technology to replace carbon-based fuels without crippling economic effects does not yet exist. And even if it did, developing a rational transition from the current infrastructure, which relies on fossil fuels, will take trillions of dollars and decades to accomplish.

The reality is that we have been given an incredible opportunity with the discovery of the vast new domestic oil and natural gas reserves now available with advanced drilling techniques. These new reserves make it possible for the U.S. to become energy self-sufficient in the coming years, something thought a fanciful dream only a few years ago. Also, there will be substantial environmental benefits as we find more ways to utilize natural gas, which, by far, is the cleanest-burning fossil fuel.

Instead of some quixotic quest to kill the entire hydrocarbon industry, the environmental community should instead embrace the realistic opportunities we have today. Greater conservation efforts and switching from coal and oil to natural gas currently are the most viable. Certainly robust research in non-carbon fuel sources should continue and be subsidized by the government with a moon landing fervor. But trying to deploy these sources while they are still far more costly than fossil fuels is a fool's mission.